The collection contains
lawyer Scott J. Atlas' digitized case files and audiovisual materials related
to his work with Ricardo Aldape Guerra, a Mexican national wrongfully held on
Texas Death Row for fifteen years before being exonerated in
1997.

Houston-based commercial litigation lawyer, Scott J. Atlas,
collected the materials that comprise this collection through his pro bono work
as a defense attorney for the capital murder trial of Ricardo Aldape Guerra. As
then head of the pro bono committee at Vinson & Elkins law firm, he was
approached by the Mexican Consulate to represent Guerra, a Mexican national on
Texas Death Row. The Mexican Consulate contacted Atlas shortly before Guerra
was scheduled to be executed on May 12, 1992. Despite him or his firm not
specializing in criminal practice, Atlas decided to accept the case after
reviewing the case files and finding patterns of police and prosecutorial
misconduct. He proceeded to work on Guerra’s case until its successful
conclusion in 1997. Atlas' numerous awards for both his pro
bono work as well as his work in commercial litigation include the Distinguished
Alumnus for Community Service from the UT School of Law Alumni Association, the
Lola Wright Foundation Award for public service and legal ethics, and repeated
listings in The Best Lawyers in America and Texas
Monthly’s Top 100 Houston Region Attorneys.

The Ricardo Aldape
Guerra case garnered international attention and support for the wrongful
conviction, fifteen year imprisonment, death sentence and eventual release of
an undocumented immigrant. Ricardo Aldape Guerra was born and raised in Colonia
Moderna, just outside of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. Like many poor and
working-class laborers in Mexico, Guerra migrated to the United States to earn
higher wages. In May 1982, twenty-year-old Guerra crossed the U.S.-Mexico
border and found work in Houston, Texas within a few days. Two months later,
Guerra was arrested and indicted for the capital murder of Houston police
officer J.D. Harris, despite all physical evidence pointing to Roberto Carrasco
Flores as the one who shot and killed Officer Harris. Flores died in a shootout
with police on the night of the crime.

With no physical evidence
implicating Guerra for the murder of officer Harris, Harris County
prosecutors appealed to heightened anti-Mexican immigrant hostility in Houston
by repeatedly emphasizing Guerra's undocumented immigration status to
the jury in order to help secure his conviction and death sentence. Prosecutors
told several jurors that they could consider Guerra’s undocumented
immigration status when deciding whether or not he posed a future threat to
society. Capital punishment procedure in 1982 required that jurors answer two
"special questions" in the affirmative in order for a defendant to
automatically receive the death penalty. The first question was whether or not
the conduct of the defendant that resulted in the death of the victim was
deliberate. The second question was whether or not there was a probability that
the defendant would commit criminal acts that would constitute a continuing
threat to society [1].

Harris County prosecutors also sought to bolster
in-court witness identification by commissioning the production of two
lifelike wax mannequins of Guerra and Flores. The prosecutors
displayed the mannequins prominently in the courtroom throughout the entire
trial, despite Guerra's attorneys' objections that the mannequins would
"inflame the minds of the jurors" [2]. In the motion for a new trial filed on
behalf of Guerra, one juror from the 1982 trial submitted an affidavit
to the court explaining her nightmares about the mannequins; "[T]he
blood-stained one...was like a dead man staring back at me," she wrote [3].
Scott J. Atlas would later argue that "[t]he State used the mannequins to
remind the jury constantly that Carrasco, who died a violent death, and Guerra
were two of a kind: both Mexican, both violent, both to be feared." [4]

In October 1982, less than three months after the murder of officer Harris,
the jury found Aldape Guerra guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to die
by lethal injection (The State of Texas vs. Ricardo
Aldape Guerra, No. 359,805). Asked by the judge if he had anything to
say, Aldape Guerra replied "Yo no soy culpable" (I am not guilty). Aldape
Guerra had maintained his innocence throughout his entire trial and
incarceration period. Outside of the Harris County Court, the Ku Klux Klan
demonstrated with signs that read: "Houston will not tolerate illegal alien
crimes."

Guerra’s wrongful conviction and death sentence
immediately mobilized Chicana/o and Mexican communities in the United States
and Mexico. In Mexico, there were several protests and demonstrations against
Aldape Guerra's conviction and death sentence, most notably in Tierra y
Libertad, a popular colonia in the northern section of Monterrey. In Houston,
Guerra's supporters organized protests, rallies, and marches, demanding
his immediate release. One week after Guerra was sentenced to death, the
Houston Chronicle reported that, "about 300 Hispanics staged a protest outside
a Harris County jail where Guerra is being held" [5]. Protesters also converged
on the Brownsville-Matamoros Bridge and, in a symbolic gesture of resistance,
briefly disrupted the transnational flow of goods and people between the United
States and Mexico.

Guerra's conviction and death sentence
occurred during a period of heightened racial tensions between the Houston
Police Department (HPD) and Black and Chicano/a communities in Houston,
especially after the police riots at Texas Southern University (TSU) in 1967;
the police assassination of Black Panther Carl Bernard Hampton in 1971; and the
police beating and drowning of Vietnam veteran Jose Campos Torres in 1977. As
Dwight Watson writes, "The evolutionary changes of the prospering city were on
a collision course with the HPD's role as...the patron saint of Jim Crow
practices" [6]. On a national level, Aldape Guerra’s case coincided with
extreme anti-Mexican immigrant hostility that resurged across the United States
in the 1970s. Just three days before jury selection started for Aldape Guerra’s
trial, the Houston Post quoted an interview in
which Clare Booth Luce, former U.S. Ambassador to Italy and widow of the
founder of Time and Life magazines, warned that "[i]nvading aliens posed a
greater threat than the atomic bomb" [7].

In 1988, the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals affirmed Guerra's conviction and death sentence (Guerra v. State , 771 S.W.2d 453). The following
year, in 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Guerra's petition for a
writ of certiorari (Guerra v. Texas, 492 U.S.
925, 109 S.Ct. 3260, 106 L.Ed.2d 606). In 1992, a few months before Aldape
Guerra’s scheduled execution, Sandra Babcock (an attorney with the now defunct
Texas Resource Center) began work on Guerra’s case. Babcock quickly
realized that Guerra's appellate case needed the human and financial
resources of a large law firm. Following the recommendation of former Texas
Governor Mark White, Babcock and representatives from the Consulate General of
Mexico in Houston asked Scott Atlas, a commercial litigation attorney for
Vinson & Elkins, to take over Guerra’s appellate case. Atlas had
gained the respect of Governor White and other attorneys in the United States
because of his work on Rummel v. Estelle (1980),
a Supreme Court case that challenged the constitutionality of Texas’ three
strikes law.

Atlas and his team of investigators and attorneys uncovered
additional evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct, including
intimidation of witnesses; manipulation several witness statements by omitting
information that exonerated Guerra or by inserting information that implicated
him; and withholding exonerating evidence from Guerra's defense attorneys. In
September 1992, Atlas filed an amended application for habeas relief in state
trial court (Ex Parte Guerra, No. 359805-A) that
significantly expanded the findings and arguments of Babcock's initial
application. However, Judge Woody Densen unexpectedly rejected the prosecutors'
request to postpone the hearing and recommended a denial of relief for
Guerra without conducting an evidentiary hearing. The application for writ of
habeas corpus was automatically forwarded to the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals where, in a one-page per curium opinion,
the court denied Guerra’s right to an evidentiary hearing and denied
habeas relief for him (Ex Parte Guerra, No.
24,021-01).

With Guerra's appeals exhausted at the state level,
Atlas filed an application for writ of habeas corpus in the United States
District Court for the Southern District In February 1993. Judge Kenneth Hoyt
ordered an evidentiary hearing for November of that year. Atlas sought to prove
to the federal court that Guerra was denied a fair and impartial trial
because of police and prosecutor intimidation of witnesses before the trial;
improper identification procedures; the prosecutors’ failure to disclose
exculpatory evidence; the prosecutors' use of evidence and arguments to the
jury that the prosecutors' knew to be false; and, finally, the cumulative
effect of prosecutorial error [8].

One year later, in November 1994,
Judge Hoyt concluded that Guerra's right to due process had been violated
because of police and prosecutorial misconduct and entered an order granting
relief to Guerra (Guerra v. Collins, 916 F.Supp.
620). In the conclusion to his issued opinion, Judge Hoyt wrote:

"The
police officers' and the prosecutors' actions described in these findings were
intentional, were done in bad faith, and are outrageous. These men and women,
sworn to uphold the law, abandoned their charge and became merchants of
chaos...Their misconduct was designed and calculated to obtain a conviction and
another 'notch in their guns' despite the overwhelming evidence that Carrasco
was the killer and the lack of evidence pointing to Guerra [9]."

The United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Hoyt’s order (Guerra v. L Johnson, 90 F.3d 1075)
and sent the Guerra's case back to the 248th District Court in Harris County, Texas. After a second evidentiary at state trial court, Judge Frank
Maloney issued an opinion that incorporated verbatim Judge Hoyt’s opinion of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Judge Maloney also granted Atlas'
request to prohibit Harris County prosecutors from using information in a future trial that Atlas had demonstrated was false, coerced, or
manipulated by police and prosecutors (The State of Texas vs. Ricardo Aldape Guerra, No. 359, 805). Within days, the
Harris County District Attorneys dropped all charges against Guerra and ordered his release.

Guerra lived on Texas' death row for fifteen years, coming twice within hours of execution,
until the state released and deported him back to Mexico in 1997. He returned
to Mexico a national hero for overcoming what many Mexicans thought to be an
unjust Texas legal system intent on punishing undocumented Mexican immigrants.
Thousands of Mexicans gathered at the airport to wait for Aldape Guerra’s plane
to arrive in Monterrey. "Ricardo was not ready for the emotional reaction he
received from his countrymen," Atlas later recalled. "He was unprepared for the
mass of humanity reaching out to touch him as if he could heal them" [10].

Only three months after his release from death row, Aldape Guerra died in a car accident on his way home from filming a
telenovela based on his life on Texas' death row. He was thirty-five years old.

One day before Guerra's scheduled execution, an appeals
judge grants Guerra's attorney (Sandra Babcock) more time to prepare a
writ of habeas corpus and moves Guerra's execution date to September 24,
1992.

With Guerra's
appeals exhausted at the state level, Atlas files an application for writ of
habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Southern
District.

1995 November

Finding overwhelming evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct before and during Guerra’s 1982 capital murder trial, Judge Hoyt orders
that Guerra must be retried within 30 days or released from death row (Guerra v. Collins, 916 F. Supp. 620, S.D. Texas, 1995).

1996

The Fifth U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirms Judge Hoyt's ruling that
Guerra's right to due process was violated due to police and prosecutorial
misconduct (Guerra v. Johnson, 90 F.3d 1075, 5th
Cir. 1996).

1997 April

After Harris County prosecutors argued that Judge Hoyt did not allow the state to present several police officers as eyewitnesses, District
Judge Werner Voigt grants the state a new hearing. He appoints retired Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Frank Maloney to conduct it. Judge Maloney’s
issued opinion incorporates verbatim Judge Hoyt’s opinion about police and prosecutorial misconduct in Guerra’s case (The
State of Texas v. Ricardo Aldape Guerra, cause no. 359, 805, 248th Judicial District, Harris County, 1997). Within days of Judge Maloney’s
opinion, the Harris County District Attorney’s office dropped all charges against Aldape Guerra. After being released from death row, Guerra
immediately returns to Monterrey, Mexico.

1997
August

Guerra dies in a car accident on his way to
Monterrey from Mexico City.

The
Scott J. Atlas Collection of Legal Materials on the Ricardo Aldape Guerra Case
consists of digitized copies of all Atlas' related case files as well as
audiovisual recordings of press coverage of the Aldape case. The University of
Texas Libraries digitized all the audiovisual materials which are available for
viewing on DVD.

The collection is organized into four series. Series
One, Case Files, consists of Atlas' digitized files
related to the Aldape case. The Case Files series is organized by the folder's
volume number assigned by Scott Atlas; when no volume number is available, the
files are in chronological order.

Series Two, Correspondence, consists of digitized copies of Atlas'
correspondence with the media, colleagues, and supporters. The majority of
correspondence is on the release of Aldape with additional correspondence on
his death. This series also contains a piece of correspondence from Pam Harris
(widow of J.D. Harris) to Ricardo Aldape Guerra.

Cite as:
[Name of document and page number, if applicable], Scott J. Atlas Collection of
Legal Materials on the Ricardo Aldape Guerra Case, Human Rights Documentation
Initiative, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin,
[link to item, if applicable].